Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson

Robert Robinson

- "Robbie" - an African-American civil rights lawyer in Savannah, Georgia - murdered when a bomb sent to his law office exploded

Joe Sullivan

- 13-year-old - mental disabilities - experienced serious physical abuse by his father and had suffered severe neglect - homeless for years - Michael Gulley and Nathan McCants convince him to accompany them when they broke into the empty house of Lena Bruner in Pensacola, Florida - forgets last line of his poem for Stevenson - convicted of raping Lena Bruner with little evidence and condemned to die in prison - uses a wheelchair - when correctional officer's could not get his wheelchair out of the cage, they had to put him on his side - like a young child - wrote a poem to Bryan Stevenson about how his life will be good soon when he lives with Bryan and Bryan is like his dad - in his poem he mentions that people will see that he is a good person - laughs so hard with Bryan Stevenson after he can't remember the line

Trina Garnett

- 14 year old - mentally disabled - sentenced to die in prison for accidentally starting a fire

Michael Gulley

- 15 - convinced 13-year-old Joe Sullivan to accompany them when they broke into the empty house of Lena Bruner in Pensacola, Florida - had an extensive criminal history with at least one sexual offense - accused Joe of sexual battery

Nathan McCants

- 17 - convinced 13-year-old Joe Sullivan to accompany them when they broke into the empty house of Lena Bruner in Pensacola, Florida - had Lena Bruner's jewelry on him

Simon Benson

- Alabama Bureau of Investigation (ABI) lead investigator

Michael O'Connor

- Bryan Stevenson's partner - Irish - reformed narcotics addict - goes to the beach on the Gulf Coast of Alabama with Bryan Stevenson (they are worried that there are sharks in the water) - stayed long past the two years he had committed to the EJI - moves to San Diego to start a job as a federal public defender

Victoria Banks

- Diane Tucker's sister - an intellectually disabled black woman - lived in Choctaw County, Alabama - accused of killing her newborn even though the police had no credible basis for thinking she was pregant - she apparently told the police she was pregnant to avoid jail time earlier - coerced into pleading guilty to killing a child who had never existed along with her sister - made a deal of 20 years - EJI won her freedom after establishing that she had a tubal ligation

David Gelber

- Ed Bradley's producer - 60 Minutes

George Ryan

- Governor of Illinois in 2003 - a Republican - commuted the death sentences of all 167 people on death row citing the unreliability of capital punishment

David Bagwell

- Lindsey's volunteer lawyer - respected civil attorney from Mobile - worked on the Wayne Ritter case - public complaints - "I generally favor the death penalty because mad dogs ought to die." - his spectacle caused the prisoners to become even more mistrustful of lawyers

Glen Colbey

- Marsha's husband - struggled finding work - Hurricane Ivan blew chaos into their life, destroying their home - lived in a FEMA camping trailer as temporary housing - buried Timothy Colbey in a marked grave behind their small camper home

Clay Kast

- Walter McMillian's white mechanic - testified that Walter McMillian's truck was not modified into a lowrider until six months after the Ronda Morrison murder

Minnie Belle McMillian

- Walter's wife - hopeful

Walt Harrington

- a Washington Post journalist - came to Alabama to do a piece on the EJI's work - heard Bryan Stevenson describe the McMillian case and passed that information to a journalist friend of his, Pete Early

Russell Charley

- a black man from Monroe County - lynched - found hanging in Vredenburgh, Alabama - known by Walter McMillian's family - believed to have been prompted by an interracial romance

Kathleen Enstice

- a forensic pathologist that worked for the state of Alabama - summoned to exhume the infant's body - told an investigator that she believed that the baby had been born alive with no basis for such an opinion - had a history of prematurely and incorrectly declaring deaths to be homicides without adequate supporting evidence

Ted Pearson

- Monroe County District Attorney - disappointed when Ralph Myers' story of the murder was so far-fetched - the prosecutor who had tried the case against Walter McMillian - illegally withheld evidence that directly resulted in Walter's wrongful conviction

Isaac Dailey

- Ralph Myers accused him of being a part of the Vickie Lynn Pittman murder - police found that he had an alibi in that he was in a jail cell on the night of the murder

Charlotte Morrison

- Rhodes Scholar - former student of Stevenson - senior attorney at EJI - worked on Marsha Colbey's case

Walter McMillian

- Stevenson meets him as he is about to start his fourth year at the SPDC - condemned man on death row - 15 years older than Stevenson - not particularly well educated - from a small rural community - very insistent that he was wrongly convicted - had a short trial - lived in Monroe County his whole life, but he had never heard of Harper Lee or "To Kill a Mockingbird" (which was celebrated by Monroeville, Alabama) - worked the fields with his family before he could attend school - started his own pulpwood business that evolved into the timber industry in the 1970s - possessed much more independence than most people in his situation - well liked by the people with whom he did business - married young to Millie, and had three children with her - cheated on Millie with other women - flirted with Karen Kelly, a young white women he'd met at Waffle House where he ate breakfast - called to the stand for the Kelly's custody hearing - this hearing shifted his reputation from a hard-working pulpwood man to something more worrisome - tried to end his relationship with Karen Kelly - arrested based primarily on Ralph Myer's allegation - an officer suggested that he had sexually assaulted him, and they planned to arrest him on sodomy charges - he was arrested on his way home with weapons drawn and slurs yelled at him - charged with capital murder in the shooting death of Ronda Morrison - he was actually at a fish fry at his house on the day of the murder, selling food to passerbyers to raise money for their church - he didn't have a tree job the day of the murder - he wanted to replace the transmission in his truck and called his mechanic friend, Jimmy Hunter, to help - put on death row BEFORE trial to create additional pressure - Sheriff Tate brought him to Holman Correctional Facility (in Atmore, Alabama) from the county jail, threatening him throughout, on August 1st, 1987 - was a lifelong smoker but found smoking at Holman nauseating and quit immediately

Lourida Ruffin

- Stevenson worked on his case - Gadsden, Alabama - 39 year old black man died of "natural causes" after being arrested for traffic violations - Stevenson won a settlement for his family after the Gadsden City Jail defendants finally acknowledged that his rights had been violated and he had been illegally denied his asthma medicine

Eva Ansley

- Stevenson's friend - ran an Alabama prison project, which tracked cases and matched lawyers with the condemned men - plans with Stevenson to start a new nonprofit in Tuscaloosa - became the EJI in Montgomery, Alabama

Charles Bliss

- Stevenson's law school classmate - moved to Atlanta for a job with the Atlanta Legal Aid Society - roommates with Stevenson in a low-rent apartment - they started in Inman Park, then moved to Virginia Highlands, and then Midtown, as rent kept increasing

Walter Garnett

- Trina Garnett's father - terribly abusive - former boxer - alcoholic

Mozelle & Onzelle

- Vickie Pittman's aunts

Jackie McMillian

- Walter McMillian and Minnie Belle McMillian's daughter - "she's in college"

Jimmy Hunter

- Walter McMillian's mechanic friend - helped Walter fix the transmission on his truck the date and time of the murder at the fish fry

Evelyn Smith

- Walter McMillian's sister - a local minister - occasionally raised money for the church by selling food on the roadside - often sold from Walter's front yard - there were at least a dozen church parishioners at the house all morning with Walter and his family on the day Ronda Morrison was murdered - reported that a member said that some church members even arrived to the fish fry late because of police presence near the cleaners

J.L. Chestnut & Bruce Boynton

- Walter McMillian's trial lawyers

Robert E. Lee Key

- a judge in Alabama - angry with Stevenson for representing Walter McMillian - thinks that Walter McMillian is one of the worst drug dealers in South Alabama - thinks McMillian could even be in the "Dixie Mafia" - sitting in Mobile, Alabama - hangs up on Stevenson

Betsy Bartholet

- a law professor who had worked as an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund - requirements of the course let Stevenson work with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee (SPDC) in Atlanta, Georgia

Ken Nunnelly

- a lawyer from the attorney general's office - took over Walter McMillian's appeal - Bryan Stevenson had dealt with him in many other death penalty cases - told Bryan Stevenson that it was all going to work out and he needed to just wait a little bit longer

Ernest Welch

- a white man whom black residents called "the furniture man" - Ronda Morrison's uncle - worked for a local furniture store - arrived on the day of the murder to collect money from Walter's mother for a purchase she had made on credit - told the folks gathered at the house that his niece had been murdered at Jackson Cleaners that morning - they discussed the shocking news with him for some time

Ralph Myers

- a white man with a badly disfigured face - lengthy criminal record - started to associate with Karen Kelly and use and deal drugs with her - implicated in the murder of Vickie Lynn Pittman - emotional, frail, craves attention - believed that everything he said had to be epic, shocking, and elaborate - horribly burned in a fire in foster care - admitted that he may have played an accidental role in the Pittman murder and put the majority of the blame on other locals - first accused a black man with a bad reputation named Isaac Dailey - he then confessed that he made up the story because the real killer was the elected sheriff of a nearby county - illiterate - then said that he had been involved in the murder of Vickie Pittman along with Karen Kelly and her black boyfriend, Walter McMillian - he then added on to say that Walter McMillian was also responsible for the murder of Ronda Morrison - made up an elaborate account of the murder of Ronda Morrison - he said that he was getting gas when Walter McMillian saw him at the gas station and forced him at gunpoint to get in his truck and drive to Monroeville because Walter's arm was supposedly hurt - they supposedly drove to Jackson Cleaners and after waiting a long time, he left and bought cigarettes, returned, and drove McMillian back to the gas station so that he could get his vehicle - he said that Walter threatened to kill him if he said anything - a few days before the capital murder charges against McMillian were made public, he told police investigators that his allegations weren't true (for his own best interest) - this backfired as the investigators responded by putting both him and McMillian on death row BEFORE trial to create additional pressure - transferred from county jail to death row (Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama) on August 1st, 1987

Michael Donald

- a young African-American man - Mobile, Alabama - lynched for supposedly sleeping with a white girl - his murder was originally not charged as a hate crime and police instead hypothesized that he must have been involved in drug dealing - his family and community persuaded the United States Department of Justice to get involved - two years later, three white men were arrested and the details of the lynching were made public

Bill Hooks

- a young black man - had a reputation as a jailhouse snitch - promised release from jail (for burglary charges) and reward money if he could connect McMillian's truck to the Morrison murder - told investigators that he had driven by Jackson Cleaners and seen a truck leave with two men inside - he later positively identified Walter McMillian's truck as the one he'd seen, specifying it was a low rider - his testimony gave law enforcement officials what they needed to charge Walter McMillian with capital murder in the shooting death of Ronda Morrison - according to Greg Cole, he eventually admitted that his trial testimony was false

Karen Kelly

- a young white woman - flirted with Walter McMillian at the Waffle House where he ate breakfast - 25 years old, 18 years younger than Walter - was unhappily married to Joe - the child custody proceedings and public scandal took a toll on her - she started using drugs and falling apart - she began to associate with Ralph Myers: a white man with a badly disfigured face and a lengthy criminal record - she used and dealt drugs with Ralph Myers - implicated in the murder of Vickie Lynn Pittman

Russ Canan

- an attorney with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee in Atlanta - volunteered to represent Evans - watched John Evans' horrendous execution - after the the second electrocution, he asked the prison commissioner who was on the phone with Governor George Wallace to grant clemency on the grounds of cruel and unusual punishment - the request was denied - after 14 minutes, his client John Evans was dead

John Thompson

- an inmate scheduled to be executed in Louisiana - a month before his execution a crime lab report was uncovered that contradicted the case that had taken place fourteen years earlier - a New Orleans jury awarded him $14 million

Rob McDuff

- an old friend of Bryan Stevenson's from Jackson, Mississippi - joined the EJI team for the civil litigation - a white native Mississippian with Southern charm and manner - had recently worked with Bryan Stevenson on a case that involved a police raid on a nightclub in Chambers County during which black residents had been illegally detained - they ended up taking the case to the SCOTUS and won a favorable ruling

Antonio Nuñez

- at fourteen, he became the youngest person in the United States condemned to die in a prison for a crime in which no one was physically injured - shot at a police car

George

- by Charlie's account, he was shot and killed by Charlie - alcoholic - abusive, beat Charlie's mother mercilessly - one night, playing cards, he hits Charlie's mother and she falls unconscious and bleeding badly on the floor

Charlie's grandmother

- called Stevenson and pleaded with him to defend her grandson - prayed on the line

Sam Crook

- calls Bryan Stevenson to tell him he supports Walter McMillian's innocence - white - self-proclaimed son of the Confederacy - Walter McMillian says that he has done a lot of work for him and says that he is "interesting"

Darnell Houston

- calls Bryan Stevenson with information on the case - young black man in his twenties - Bryan Stevenson goes to his house to talk - knows that Bill Hooks is lying - he was working with Bill Hooks on the day of Ronda Morrison's murder at the NAPA auto parts store - they heard the sirens and saw the ambulances - knows that there was no way Bill Hooks drove by the cleaners in the time frame of the murder

Tom Tate

- elected the new sheriff of Monroe County days after the murder took place - inexperienced in law enforcement - when arresting Walter McMillian he used violence and reportedly said "'We're going to keep all you n****** from running around with these white girls. I ought to take you off and hang you like we done that n***** in Mobile," referring to the lynching of Michael Donald - celebrated for convicting Walter McMillian - refused to release Walter McMillian despite family members, church members, black pastors, and others pleading with him and offering their testimonies - brought Walter McMillian to death row (Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama) from the county jail on August 1st, 1987

John Evans

- electrocuted in Holman's execution chamber ("Yellow Mama") - filmed an after school special for kids where he shared the story of his life and urged them to avoid the mistakes he had made - electrocuted three times - endured 14 minutes of torture before the execution was complete

Michael Lindsey

- electrocuted in Holman's execution chamber ("Yellow Mama") - received a sentence of life imprisonment without parole from his jury - the judge had "overridden" it and imposed a death penalty

Herbert Richardson

- electrocuted in Holman's execution chamber ("Yellow Mama") - sang "The Old Rugged Cross"

Horace Dunkins

- electrocuted in Holman's execution chamber ("Yellow Mama") - intellectual disabilities - botched execution

John Patterson

- former KKK-backed governor of Alabama

George Stinney

- fourteen year old boy - executed in 1944

Charlie

- fourteen years old - by his own account, had shot and killed a man named George - after seeing how much blood was around his mother, he goes to their bedroom and finds George's gun which is under the Auburn University T-shirt - goes over to a sleeping George, and shoots him in the head - at this point, his mother starts making noise again and he goes into the kitchen and calls the police - in adult prison - looks even younger than 14 - sexually assaulted in prison - wouldn't talk to Bryan Stevenson at first

Bridget Lee

- gave birth to a stillborn baby in Pickens County, Alabama - she was charged with capital murder and was wrongfully imprisoned - got pregnant after an extramarital affair and wanted to secretly put the child up for adoption - it turned out the baby died due to neonatal pneumonia

George Wallace

- governor - on the line with the prison commissioner during John Evans' execution - did not grant him clemency even after two shocks

Bryan Stevenson

- grew up in a poor, rural, racially segregated settlement on the eastern shore of the Delmarva Peninsula, in Delaware - went to a small college in Pennsylvania - went to Harvard Law School - the summer after his first year in law school worked in a juvenile justice project in Philadelphia and took advanced calculus courses at night to prepare for his next year at the Kennedy School - started a public policy program - started an internship at the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee (SPDC) in Atlanta through Betsy Bartholet's course - after graduation, he returned to the SPDC in Atlanta to work full time - slept on Steve Bright's couch in Atlanta for a year and a half in Grant Park - then moved into a low-rent apartment with Charlie Bliss: his law school classmate - they started in Inman Park, then moved to Virginia Highlands, and then Midtown, as rent kept increasing - owned a 1975 Honda Civic - as he sat outside his apartment listening to music, Atlanta SWAT police officers drew their weapons and apprehended him - white older neighbors just watched, and demanded the cops ask about their missing vacuum cleaner, radio, cat, and other so-called "thefts" - tried to file a lengthy and comprehensive complaint against the Atlanta police

Stevenson's mother

- had a civilian job at an Air Force base

Avery Jenkins

- has a mental disability - abandoned in woods by foster family - stabs an elderly man to death thinking that he was a demon

Efernia McMclendon

- imprisoned for having an unplanned pregnancy and bad judgement - a young black teenager from Opelika, Alabama - got pregnant in high school and didn't tell her parents - delivered at five months and left the stillborn baby's remains in a drainage ditch

Pete Earley

- journalist - friend of Walt Harrington - contacted Bryan Stevenson and jumped into Walter McMillian's case

Robert Vance

- killed in Birmingham by a mail bomb

Dorothea Dix & Reverend Louis Dwight

- led a successful campaign to get mentally ill people out of prison

Stevenson's father

- left the area as a teenager to go to highschool - returned with his wife - worked in a food factory - did domestic work at beach cottages and rentals on the weekend

MaryLynn

- lost her hearing from Herbert Richardson's bomb

George Daniel

- mentally ill after a car accident - gets on a bus and travels far - wanders into the home of an elderly woman - police uses force against him and in the struggle the police weapon shoots the officer - convicted despite his mental issues

Vickie Lynn Pittman

- murdered - Ralph Myers and Karen Kelly implicated in the murder - came from a poor white family, several of whose members were incarcerated - she enjoyed none of the status of Ronda Morrison and so the news of her murder was swept aside in lieu of the Morrison murder

Stevenson's grandfather

- murdered when Stevenson was a teenager

Tom Taylor & Greg Cole

- new ABI investigators - seem to doubt that Walter McMillian was guilty

Bernard Harcourt

- new attorney - replaced Michael O'Connor on Walter's case - smart, determined, and extremely hardworking - he first worked with Bryan Stevenson when he was a law student at Harvard Law School - cut short his two-year clerkship with a federal judge to join the EJI in Alabama - raised in NYC by French parents - attended the Lycée Français de New York in Manhattan - graduated from Princeton - worked in banking before pursuing his law degree - Mia is his girlfriend - they moved to Montgomery, Alabama

Debbie Cook

- nosy neighbor of the Colbey's - reported the "crime"

Marsha Colbey

- poor white woman - convicted for killing her infant who was really miscarried - spoke at the EJI's annual gala in an elegant royal blue gown - Hurricane Ivan blew chaos into their life, destroying their home - six children - lived in a FEMA camping trailer as temporary housing - gave birth to a stillborn baby in the tub - buried Timothy Colbey in a marked grave behind their small camper home - reacted badly to police questioning and initially tried to misdirect their efforts - a few weeks after delivering Timothy Colbey, she was arrested and charged with capital murder

Sharon

- receptionist at the EJI - a young mother of two small children - had grown up in a poor, rural white family - answered a threatening call from a middle-aged Southern man

Clarence Brantley

- released from death row in 1990 in Texas - his case had also been featured on "60 Minutes"

Ed Seger

- reported that George Daniel was "faking" psychosis - later is realized to be a fraud and not a real doctor

Mrs. Williams

- scared of the police dog - conquered her fear to enter on the third day

Woodrow Ikner

- second on the scene for Ronda Morrison - asked to lie that her body was near the front - fired because he refused to lie - testified on behalf of Walter McMillian

Ian Manuel

- shot Debbie Baigre in the cheek during a robbery, she didn't die - cut himself - spent 18 years in uninterrupted solitary confinement - extremely intelligent - writes poetry

Debbie Baigre

- shot in the cheek by Ian Manuel during a robbery - recovered and became a bodybuilder - wanted Ian Manuel's sentence to be shortened

Joe Hightower

- spoke falsehoods against Walter McMillian - according to Greg Cole, he eventually admitted that his trial testimony was false

Officer Kenneth Lewellen

- spoke with Debbie Cook about her suspicions - went to the Colbey's home - noticed the marked grave beside their home

Kristen Nelson

- staff attorney at EJI - Harvard Law graduate - worked at the Public Defender Service for DC - worked on Marsha Colbey's case

Timothy Colbey

- stillborn

Francis Newsome

- testified against Trina Garnett in return for her freedom

Ronda Morrison

- the beautiful young daughter of a respected local family - 18 year old college student - found dead on the floor of Monroe Cleaners on November 1st, 1986; she was shot three times in the back

Rick Blair

- the current owner of the cleaners

Stevenson's grandmother

- the daughter of people who were enslaved in Caroline County, Virginia - constantly told Stevenson to "Keep close." - hugged Stevenson often

Steve Bright

- the director of the SPDC - Stevenson met him in Charlotte, North Carolina on a layover to Atlanta - Stevenson spent the first year and a half of his legal career sleeping on his living room couch in Atlanta

Harry Connick Sr.

- the district attorney in John Thompson's case - illegally suppressed evidence of Thompson's innocence - was not held liable for his misconduct in a criminal case

Larry Ikner

- the district attorney's investigator

Vic Pittman

- the father of Vickie Pittman - suspected of being involved in his daughters murder

Henry

- the first inmate Stevenson meets at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center: "Jackson" - Stevenson tells him he is not going to get assigned an execution date anytime soon - talks with Stevenson for three hours - the officer puts the handcuffs on too tight, and Stevenson argues, but he is calm and collected - sings a hymn on his way out: "I'm pressing on, the upward way...Lord, plant my feet on Higher Ground."

Tom Chapman

- the new Monroe County district attorney - a former criminal defense attorney - the worst

Rena Mae

- the victim of Herbert Richardson's bomb

Joshua Colbey

- they found cocaine in Marsha Colbey's system when she was pregnant with him: her youngest son

Chief Justice William Rehnquist

- urged restrictions on death penalty appeals and the endless efforts of lawyers to stop executions - "Let's get on with it," he famously declared at a bar association event in 1988

Ed Bradley

- veteran reporter - 60 Minutes - the Monroe Journal and local officials were upset that he was in town

Joe (Kelly)

- was unhappily married to Karen Kelly - he and his whole family were outraged with the news that Karen Kelly was involved with Walter McMillian: a black man - started legal proceedings for custody of their children and wanted to disgrace his wife

Mr. & Mrs. Jennings

- white - "adopted" Charlie - helped Charlie get his general equivalency degree in detention and financed his college education

Diane Jones

- wrongly convicted and sentenced to die in prison for a crime she had not committed - wrongly implicated in a drug-trafficking operation that involved her former boyfriend - the EJI won her release from Tutwiler - wanted the EJI to help so many other people in the prison